Ask HN: Experienced php/LAMP developers, what is your hourly rate?

i did LAMP consulting in college to help pay for "cigarettes". i quoted $60 to $85 an hour, depending on how much i thought my client would be willing to pay. i would refuse to do flat-rate jobs, though i would provide an estimate, and i almost always finish quicker than i estimated.

i would always start with a $1500 retainer, payable via check.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zack_public/Invoice+-+Template.doc https://s3.amazonaws.com/zack_public/default_contracting_agr...

In my experience, at least (I'm not the grandparent poster), the projects that you get burned on the worst are always the flat-quote projects. Get stuck with one or two really bad ones, and you'll really wish you'd stuck to hourly, even if the good flat-quote projects can be the most profitable.

There are just so many more things that can go wrong. The biggest one is shifting or unclear specs - you may think that a spec was clear enough, but when the client comes back to you 90% of the way through the project and complains that obviously there should have been an admin panel included in that quote, what use is it without an admin panel, certainly that was implicit, and we're not going to pay you unless you put this extra feature in, you've now got two options: suck it up and do it, or start a fight with the client. Both suck, and even when you're completely in the right contractually, to push that point causes friction, and a headache for you. Don't expect any future work, or recommendations, if you have to go that route.

More than that, working hourly changes the way you feel about interacting with clients - whereas under a fixed quote, every interaction is one more opportunity for the client to pile more work on, or to reject work that you've done, or to otherwise make your life more difficult in some way without increasing your compensation (at least without a bit of renegotiation), when you're hourly you're happy to interact with the client; if they pile on more work, they're aware that it's going to take more time, and that they're going to pay you more money. Each interaction becomes a potential increase in the amount of money you're billing instead of a potential increase in the amount of time you spend to earn the same amount. When you're on a fixed quote project, it's an extremely rare interaction that lessens the amount of work you need to do; generally speaking, the more you talk to the client, the more you end up doing for them.

Further, you can cut off billing problems earlier on long term projects by billing them regularly for time spent; this makes problem customers expose themselves much earlier, and you'll never be left at the end of a long project trying to collect half a year's salary from a company that's giving you the runaround.

There are a few exceptions where it makes much more sense to bill by the project, but those you should know when you see them (i.e. if you can do the project in a fraction of the time that most other people could, the acceptance criteria are very strict and absolutely cannot shift or be argued about, you really trust the client, owe them a favor, etc.).

The rest of the time, you'll experience a lot less pain billing for your time instead of for the product...